October 2, 2014

The Braintrust Gets The Facts Wrong. Again.

The editorial board at the Tribune-Review dutifully followed the right wing "blame Obama first" meme with this from a few days ago:

It's a pretty safe bet that President Obama won't be invited to the CIA's Christmas party this year.

Mr. Obama, in an interview with CBS' “60 Minutes” on Sunday, once again blamed the nation's foreign intelligence-gathering service for supposedly underestimating the rise and wherewithal of the terrorist group known as ISIS.

But given the facts, the president must share the blame. For as more than a few astute intelligence watchers have reminded, the White House was informed and warned of the gathering storm.

Given the facts? Let's take a look at what the president said on 60 Minutes. When asked whether ISIL's rise was a surprise, he answered:

Well I think, our head of the intelligence community, Jim Clapper, has acknowledged that I think they underestimated what had been taking place in Syria.

What we didn’t do was predict the will to fight. That’s always a problem. We didn’t do it in Vietnam. We underestimated the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese and overestimated the will of the South Vietnamese. In this case, we underestimated ISIL [the Islamic State] and overestimated the fighting capability of the Iraqi army.... I didn’t see the collapse of the Iraqi security force in the north coming. I didn’t see that. It boils down to predicting the will to fight, which is an imponderable.

Um...

So Clapper said the Intelligence Community underestimated ISIL and the president said that Clapper said that the Intelligence Community underestimated ISIL and yet to the braintrust, this is...what, exactly?

1 comment:

Unlike the cowboy idiot who lied about WMDs.FLASHBACK: When George W. Bush Predicted ISIS in Iraqhttp://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2014/09/10/flashback-when-george-w-bush-predicted-isis-n1889859